The Foundations of Buddhism

The Mahayana 227

his meeting with a previous buddha, Dipmpkara. Megha could

have chosen to become a disciple of Diparpkara and followed

the path, to awakening, and thus become an arhat in that very

life. If he had done so that would have been the end, of the mat-

ter: there would have been no Gautama Buddha, only the arhat

Megha. But he did not follow the path to immediate arhatship;

instead he chose to practise the perfections (paramita/paramz)
and so eventually-many, many lifetimes, many, many aeons later
-he became the samyaksam-buddha, Gautama. The reason for
Megha's decision is that he was inspired by the compassionate
ideal of the bodhisattva path: having become awakened him-

self, he would lead others to awakening.^4 The traditional notion

of the arhat is that he becomes awakened and then effectively dis-
appears from sarpsara; the bodhisattva, on the other hand, spends
many aeons in saq1sara perfecting spiritual qualities, and, in the
process, working for the benefit of sentient beings; eventually
he becomes a fully awakened buddha, but only when the teach-
ing of the previous buddha has disappeared from the world. In
choosing the path of the bodhisattva, Megha thus forgoes his
own immediate release from suffering, as an arhat, in order to
become a buddha and teach the path to the cessation of suffer-
ing to other beings.

This basic distinction between the career of the disciple and

the career of the bodhisattva is thus presupposed by all Buddhist

thought. But the,earlier tradition tends to emphasize that as

far as the fundamental liberating knowledge of the four noble
truths is concerned the Buddha and his disciples are equal. But

a gap between the Buddha and arhat none the less exists. We

can trace in Buddhist literature generally an increasing tendency
to exalt the figure of the Buddha and to dwell on the description
of his incomparable virtues and superhuman powers; lists such
as the ten powers of the Tathagata and the eighteen special qual-

ities of a Buddha are common to all Buddhist schools. But with

a text such as the Lokanuvartana Sutra ('discourse on con-

forming to the world') the Buddha is seen less and less as a his-

torical personality and more and more as a transcendent being
who merely appears to conform to the conventions of worldly